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Background

Founded in 1998 PayPal provides online payment solutions to its users allowing them money through their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards, or promotional financing without sharing financial information. PayPal has quickly become a global leader in online payment solutions with more than 153 million accounts worldwide. Available in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world, PayPal facilitates global e-commerce by making payments possible across different locations, currencies, and languages.

Challenges

Today PayPal is leveraging OpenStack for their private cloud and runs more than 100,000 VMs. This private cloud runs 100% of their web and mid-tier applications and services.
One of the biggest desires of the PayPal business is to modernize their datacenter infrastructure, making it more on demand, improving its security, meeting compliance regulations and lastly, making everything cost efficient. They wanted to refactor their existing Java and C++ legacy applications by dockerizing them and deploying them as containers. This called for a technology that provides a distributed application deployment architecture and can manage workloads but must also be deployed in both private, and eventually public cloud environments.
Being cost efficient was extremely important for the company. Since PayPal runs their own cloud, they pay close attention to how much money they are spending on actually running their datacenter infrastructure.
Functioning within the online payment industry, PayPal must ensure the security of their internal data (binaries and artifacts with the source code of their applications). This makes them a very security-conscious company. Their sensitive data needs to be kept on-premises where their security teams can run ongoing scans and sign their code before deploying out to production.
PayPal’s massive popularity is a good thing, but it also means they must handle the deluge of demands from their users. At times they process more than 200 payments per second. When including Braintree and Venmo, the companies that PayPal acquired, that number continues to soar even higher. Recently, it was announced that Braintree is processing more than a billion a month when it comes to mobile payments!. That adds quite a bit of extra pressure on their infrastructure.

Solution

Today PayPal uses Docker’s commercial solutions to enable them to not only provide gains for their developers, in terms of productivity and agility, but also for their infrastructure teams in the form of cost efficiency and enterprise-grade security. The tools being used in production today include: Docker Commercially Supported engine (CS Engine), Docker Trusted Registry as well as Docker Compose.
The company believes that containers and VMs can coexist and combine the two technologies. Leveraging Docker containers and VMs together gives PayPal the ability to run more applications while reducing the number of total VMs, optimizing their infrastructure. This also allows PayPal to spin up a new application much more quickly, and on an “as needed” basis. Since containers are more lightweight and instantiate in a fraction of a second, while VMs take minutes, they can roll out a new application instance quickly, patch an existing application, or even add capacity for holiday readiness to compensate for peak times within the year. This helps drive innovation and help them outpace competition.
Docker Trusted Registry gives their team enterprise security features like granular role based access controls, and image signing that ensures that all of PayPal’s checks and balances are in place. The tool provides them with the on-premises enterprise-grade registry service they need in order to provide secure collaboration for their image content. There security team can run ongoing scans and sign code before deploying to production.
With Docker, the company has gained the ability to scale quickly, deploy faster, and one day even provide local desktop-based development environments with Docker. For that, they are looking to Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows, which offer Docker as a local development environment to their 4,000+ developers located across the globe.